With trade volume registering more than US$10 billion in recent years, Malaysia has already been China’s largest Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) trading partner since 2008 and its third biggest Asian trading partner after Japan and South Korea. It is expected that China–Malaysia bilateral trade with an 8% annual growth rate will continue to expand, and this strong bilateral tie is set to be strengthened in the face of Chinese president Xi Jinping’s efforts to enhance regional connectivity and especially maritime linkage by proposing the “One Belt One Road” (OBOR) construction. Malaysia is well placed, probably even better than most of its ASEAN neighbors, to embrace the opportunities brought about by the surge of infrastructure development and trade deals that is going to come with the progress in constructing the ocean-based Maritime Silk Road (MSR), one of the two initiatives of OBOR, the other being the land-based Silk Road Economic Belt. With Malaysia’s traditional linkage with China’s southeastern provinces of Guangdong and Fujian, and as the holder of the Strait of Malacca, Malaysia is occupying a key strategic location that can serve well as China’s gateway to the ASEAN Economic Community. A statement made by the Malaysian transport minister has declared that a few ports in Malaysia has been identified to be part of the MSR. The close ties between both countries have resulted in cooperation in the transportation field such as railway projects and purchasing of trains from China. Indeed, Malaysia is in the process of developing inter–port city collaboration between China’s Qinzhou Port and Malaysia’s Kuantan Port. In recent years, China’s Guangxi Beibu Gulf International Port Group has bought a 40% stake in Malaysia’s Kuantan Port Consortium from the construction group IJM Group for a total of US$102 million. It is in such context and with due consideration of such developments that this paper will explore the prospects and challenges facing China–Malaysia cooperation within the overall framework of China–ASEAN strategic relations.

This study examines the extent to which existing foreign direct investment (FDI) theories apply to Chinese investment in the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) countries. This is important because existing explanations of Chinese outward FDI (OFDI) generally make scant reference to these theories. By using OFDI data for BRI countries between 2003 and 2017, we tested hypothesizes applicable to existing theories by using both pooled ordinary least squares (PLOS) and stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) methods. The results show that a large part of the existing theories apply to Chinese OFDI. Chinese OFDI is likely to choose countries with big market size, abundant natural resources, cheap unskilled labor, stable politics, good infrastructure, high trade cost and high investment cost. These positive findings notwithstanding, they do not invalidate the alternative factors cited by commentators which have not been subject to direct testing, which may require the use of qualitative analytical approaches.

Chinese multinational enterprises, as the most active emerging-market investors, face mounting challenges in sustaining outward foreign direct investment (OFDI) under increasingly volatile global environments, yet how ESG performance shapes firms’ capacity to withstand and recover from external shocks remains poorly understood. This study investigates whether and how ESG performance enhances the OFDI resilience of Chinese multinational enterprises across the resistance phase and the recovery phase. We hypothesize that ESG performance enhances OFDI resilience through phase-specific mechanisms: in the resistance phase, ESG functions as a static resource buffer grounded in the resource-based view, while in the recovery phase, it operates as a dynamic reconfiguration mechanism consistent with the dynamic capabilities view. Using a panel dataset of 19,691 firm-year observations from Chinese A-share listed firms spanning 2008 to 2024, we employ a fixed-effects panel model to test these hypotheses. The results show that ESG performance significantly enhances OFDI resilience in both phases, and this conclusion holds after robustness and endogeneity tests. Mechanism analysis reveals that green innovation mediates the effect in both the resistance and recovery phases, while supply chain resilience and investment efficiency serve as additional mediating channels exclusively in the resistance phase. By introducing a phase-dependent perspective and highlighting ESG’s distinct roles across shock stages, this study provides practical guidance for emerging-market multinational enterprises on how to leverage ESG performance to build sustainable OFDI resilience in volatile global environments.